Inside the yearnings of a potential suicide bomber

I wasn't attracted to their brand of religion; I was attracted to them as people. I was 14 and the first time I knew one of them, we were playing football and he was a very decent person who took care of people around him. If I was absent for some time, he would ask about me. We built up a relationship as human beings.

The first time I asked someone for help, we were playing football and we kicked the ball into the body of a passerby. He started shouting at us, and I think he said something bad about our religion.

Unfortunately for this man, he was Christian, and I told my friend what had happened. The next day, he talked to the brothers and went to this man and had a fight with him. I felt a sense of protection and power. From the outside you would think there is brainwashing in the sense that some people are giving you a lecture about what you should do. But it's not. It's like a new group of friends who approach you to play football. Then you start talking about religion.

At that time you already like them and want to be one of them because you like their courage and sense of donation.

We started to go to the mosque more frequently and learning the basics of religion. This was 1986 and Egyptian society was not religious. We created a new way of looking at life. It was not just how to play, it was asking questions like, what is the meaning of being religious? What is the meaning of Islam? It stated that this life is very short and real life is after death.

So when I believed in this I didn't question myself further. They taught us that Islam means you can't argue about text because the text is what God said. We applied this idea to different aspects of religion: fasting, praying, all kinds of things.

At a later stage, you have to think of other aspects which require you to sacrifice more. This depended on changing the regimes which didn't apply the word of God. We learnt that we couldn't do this except by using violence because God doesn't change our lives. We are tools of God, so we have to do it ourselves. If we didn't do it, nobody would. That's how the idea of using violence came about. It was like all the revolutionary thinking in the world: you sacrifice yourself for change for the better and for all those poor and unprivileged people.

Countries like Britain and America were seen as part of a conspiracy against Muslims, but we didn't care about them a lot because the idea was to get rid of the Egyptian regime, the closest enemy. It's not a good idea to go off and fight others, leaving the enemy at your back.

The idea was to train yourself to apply words of God, not to make a big scene. We were asked to do very small tasks like changing the habits of other people. I remember I was asked once to go and follow a tourist who was carrying a bag of wine bottles until we got into a quiet place then smash the bottles with a stone.

Clashes between el-Gama'a el-Islamiya and the regime in Egypt took a bigger shape. I was preaching to people in my school and then my university and was jailed for six weeks without trial for disturbing the public atmosphere.We used to notice some of our friends disappeared. Then we knew that they had carried out an operation and been killed. Some of them, including one of my friends, were involved in the assassination [of President Anwar Sadat].

You don't know exactly how they choose such people for operations, but we were told that they chose people who showed a very high degree of obedience. This word is used in Islam's terminology in a different way. It means obedience to God, because they think they are the carriers of God's words, rather than being submissive.

At one stage I thought I would love to be chosen. I spent a great deal of time thinking: "What if they ask me?" The idea of suicide bombing wasn't obvious but the idea of martyrdom was prominent. I would have liked to do something I thought mattered - sacrificing yourself to establish heaven on Earth. For me the real question was: 'Am I able to sacrifice more or not?' It wasn't: 'Am I going to do a wrong thing or right thing?' I knew I was right. For me at the time, the Koran said so. When Islamist people become suicide bombers they believe that God is ordering them to do it. They are not lying to themselves. They are not bad people. Your life is completely being lived for its sake until a point when you can't really differentiate between yourself and your ideology. If they destroy this ideology, they destroy you.

You question it if you find other people and other things to do. For me, the starting point was when I moved from Assiut to Cairo because I thought security services would be chasing me. At Cairo University I found people who set up literature meetings. I started seeing them. I was occupied by other things.

Until I started writing my book in 1999 I had a lot of uncertainties about Islamism and how far I am from it. But once I put my ideas in front of me, and I stayed up at night examining them, everything became clear. This is something I can't imagine that I once believed in.

· Khaled al-Berry, author of Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise, was talking to David Smith